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Chronicling ephemera

THE landmark event in music journalism in the past decade was the 2007 publication of "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross, a music critic at the New Yorker (interviewed here). The book is a cultural history of 20th-century music, with an emphasis firmly on the classical rather than the popular. Not long after Mr Ross published his acclaimed book, Bob Stanley, a music journalist and former pop star, started work on his own cultural history - one that tells the story of modern pop, or the bits that Mr Ross left out. Called "Yeah Yeah Yeah", this hulking tome is now out. Together these two books have the sounds of the last century licked.

Mr Stanley puts pop's year zero at 1952, when EMI began to sell 45s, Dansette manufactured a portable record player and the New Musical Express published its first singles chart. The artists in that chart - Nat King Cole, Rosemary Clooney and Vera Lynn - did not appeal to the youth of the day. It took the arrival of Bill Haley's exhilarating "Rock Around the Clock" in 1955 for pop to find its ideal customer: the teenager.

From here, Mr Stanley embarks on a long, chronological journey, zipping back and forth across the Atlantic to itemise pop's many movements. Indeed, the relationship between Britain and America is one of the book's strongest threads. In the 1950s Britain was bombed out while America was rising. It was only with the arrival of the Beatles in 1962 that the trade became bilateral. Trends in music have sustained this balance, with America importing British psychedelic rock in the 1970s and big beat in the 1990s, while Brits get down to American disco and hip-hop.

What "Yeah Yeah Yeah" makes plain is that pop is a young person's game. The music's most innovative and interesting characters have always been precocious: Joe Meek, the first celebrity producer, retired at 25; Andrew Loog Oldham was the Rolling Stones' manager at 19; Sid Vicious kicked off punk and was dead by 21; Prince and Michael Jackson were washed up and weird by their late 20s; Beyonce Knowles achieved her stardom while still a teenager. Late-bloomers, like the Bee Gees, are the exception.

This helps explain why pop musicians care little for repetition or mastery, and the music itself has a short shelf life. Pop is driven by a relentless search for the new, and the music has become more disposable through the decades. When the Jam's single "Going Underground" instantly topped the charts in 1980, this achievement was rare (the last time a song went straight to number-one was 1973). But already by the 1990s advance plays of singles on the radio meant that its first-week sales were always the biggest. These days singles enter the charts at the top and then swiftly fall away into obscurity. A tiny fraction of hits enter the canon and are played for decades; the rest are largely forgotten.

Mr Stanley's willingness to pause for breath and rescue some of pop's vignettes from obscurity makes "Yeah Yeah Yeah" entertaining rather than merely dizzying. His research digs up some delights: Canned Heat's Bob Hite used to buy copies of rare records that he already owned in order to smash them up and increase the scarcity of his copies; Jimi Hendrix lifted the "Coronation Street" theme for "Third Stone from the Sun"; Ice-T, an American rapper, had a pit-bull called Felony.

Like Mr Ross, Mr Stanley is generally a genial and generous tour guide, a man in love with his subject. But "Yeah Yeah Yeah" is often at its most entertaining when he slips from being a slightly detached historian and becomes a more candid critic. He doesn't care much for Pink Floyd: "More rock theatre, ever greater, emptier extravaganzas, replaced their self-flagellating desire to drift, and the only way they could agree to go forward was by hiding behind pyrotechnics and flying pigs. It seemed that they hated being themselves." And he has little time for Joni Mitchell: "The real problem for her was that other people always made her songs sound more lovable. She had a habit of cramming more words in than were actually necessary, and delivering them in a flustered schoolma'am voice". As for Queen, he writes that the band "seemed closer to a multinational company than a pop group".

If there is a problem with "Yeah Yeah Yeah", it involves the sheer impossibility of finding space for all of the voices that have shaped pop within a single volume. Mr Hendrix is discovered, records three seminal albums, goes off the rails and dies in the space of a page. And Mr Stanley appears to run out of steam near the end. After the "wall of lager" of Britpop in the mid-1990s, there is a chapter on the innovation of R&B in the noughties, a few references to the fact that people buy musical digitally these days, and then it is over.

Most likely, Mr Stanley does not yet know what to make of pop's most recent developments. The internet means that music "scenes" no longer develop geographically any more. Mr Stanley introduces his book with a reference to the death of pop, "using the end of vinyl as pop's main format as a line in the sand". This feels like an arbitrary distinction. Perhaps pop's constant shapeshifting and deference to youth simply makes it a difficult art to penetrate from middle age. In time there will be a great book written about the sprawling and complex way that music is produced and consumed in the current century. But for now, Messrs Ross and Stanley have done a fine job chronicling the trends of the previous one.